Day of Reckoning

Every so often we need to list actions that are insane, inane, and inhumane. Today, let’s do some accounting.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and José are not just a part of hurricane season. They are part of an ever more worrisome chain of cataclysmic events caused by climate change. Yes, we should care about the people affected—those who have lost life, property, livelihood, and clean water—in every way we can, and we have to stop causing these events, then throwing up our hands as if we don’t understand their origin, and then calling upon people to clean up the messes.

Colin Kaepernick and dozens of other NFL players are not just well-paid professional athletes with a bone to pick. They are brave individuals who are responding to a system of oppression that we white people have created and perpetuated. We have all witnessed the excessive use of force on African Americans, resulting in death, incarceration, and entrenched patterns that we are only now starting to acknowledge. We shouldn’t foment racism and then criticize those who protest it, those who have a legitimate cause to question allegiance to a flag whose country has never chosen to represent their interests. Colin Kaepernick should have a solid Title VII case working, especially given the retaliation he has suffered for his important gesture of resistance, a gesture made in a context highly visible to white men, the group perhaps most in need of lessons about United States history and present-day realities.

The events of Charlottesville didn’t happen in a vacuum. We have spent too long neglecting the evolution of the First Amendment and indulging a long outdated interpretation of the Second Amendment. Jeff Sessions is busy accusing college and university campuses of serving as echo chambers for people with homogeneous opinions and fragile egos, hearkening back to some mythical good old days when tough people argued out tough opinions. Whatever good old days he may be referring to were days when colleges and universities had not yet opened their doors to many people who weren’t white or male. Not all white males have the same opinions, but an environment that welcomes them and them only also protects them from heterogeneity and challenges to their privilege. It creates power systems for them and them only, power systems that manifest themselves in the very type of government that is not working for many of us at this moment. The powerful weapons available to the common person give the Second Amendment a ferocious sway over the First, as we witnessed so clearly in Charlottesville. Open-carry laws on campuses such as The University of Texas certainly chill free speech freedoms and impulses.

It is no coincidence that Betsy DeVos is unraveling all of the equality work done by President Obama. We created Betsy DeVos, and her toady, Candice Jackson, by allowing attack after attack on the character and actions of the most qualified candidate for the presidency, demonstrating that we can’t stand women who have earned power, and giving power to someone wholly unqualified to be Secretary of Education just because she is (1) a billionaire and (2) willing to assume that women who have been raped are liars and to give alleged rapists (Brock Turner, for example) the overwhelming benefit of the doubt. DeVos serves to dismantle Obama-era protections, yet another demonstration of the racist need to undo all the good work done by a black president. Trump’s proposal to Congress to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) again erases an Obama-era program and, according to this article from The Atlantic, reverses upward mobility for many of the nation’s young people.

The travel ban imposed upon Muslim-majority nations, a ban rearing its ugly head anew, now includes Chad, North Korea, and Venezuela, much to the confusion of most people who are experts in information-sharing among nations with an interest in eliminating state-sponsored terrorism. Chad’s inclusion, even in a Trumpian worldview, is quite confusing. Trump has baited North Korea and then blamed the nation for its (admittedly) dangerous and (hopefully) unwarranted missile tests. The ban of Venezuela, whose citizens are suffering in many ways, including vast food shortages, seems cruel and, to put it lightly, un-neighborly, especially for a nation that offered aid to the United States after Harvey and Irma. The inclusion of non-Muslim-majority nations represents a chess move on Trump’s part to attempt to make the ban appear less targeted at one religious group.

Despite recommendations from his top military advisers and servants, the “president” continues to insist that transgender individuals should not serve in the military. We shouldn’t have to be in an uproar about having a president treat people as less than human for their race, religion, national origin, and gender identity. These groups are supposed to be protected under the law (Title VII, 1964, and Title IX, 1972) of the United States and are now targeted by the government of the United States.

What happened to infrastructure and jobs? Why have the “president” and Congress spent nine months trying to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, only to find that it is the best solution we have so far? (They could have spent those nine months fixing certain elements of the ACA to make it even stronger.) Where are the “progress” and “greatness”? What is beneficial, humane, kind, generous, or noble about the way the United States is conducting business these days, within the country and beyond it?

Even Forbes has a list of the ten most offensive tweets from our “president.” A man who uses his Twitter account and the Oval Office as a policy machine, bully pulpit, and series of contradictions is running our country into the ground.